You might have been dealing with estrangement for months or even years.
You may have built a life around it. You go to work, see friends, make plans and get on with things.
And yet, every so often, it comes back.
A birthday.
A family gathering.
A photograph.
A song.
Something someone says.
Suddenly, you’re thinking about it again.
You might find yourself wondering:
“Why am I still affected by this?”
“Shouldn’t I be over it by now?”
“Why does this still hurt?”
The truth is, moving forward from estrangement doesn’t necessarily mean reaching a point where you never think about it again.
Estrangement doesn’t always have a clear ending
When a relationship ends through estrangement, there isn’t always a clear moment when it is over.
There may be no conversation where everything is explained.
No shared understanding of what happened.
No agreement about what went wrong.
And sometimes, no certainty about whether the relationship will ever change.
That can leave you carrying unanswered questions alongside the loss itself.
You may find yourself replaying conversations, wondering what you could have said differently or trying to understand how things reached this point.
Your mind may keep returning to the situation because part of you is still trying to make sense of something that doesn’t have a simple answer.
You can be moving forward and still feel sad
Sometimes people think that if they are still grieving, they must not be moving forward.
But the two things can exist together.
You can be building a life that feels good and still have difficult days.
You can feel settled in your decision and still miss someone.
You can feel relief about the distance and still grieve the relationship you wished you could have had.
You can accept that things are different without feeling completely at peace with everything that happened.
These feelings don’t necessarily mean you’re going backwards.
They may simply mean that the relationship mattered to you.
Sometimes the past keeps pulling you back
There may also be things that haven’t been fully processed.
Perhaps there is guilt.
Perhaps there is anger.
Perhaps you are still trying to understand whether you made the right decision.
Perhaps there are boundaries you are still working out.
Or perhaps you are carrying grief for something that never became what you hoped it would be.
Sometimes what looks like “not moving on” is actually a sign that there is something you haven’t yet had the space to understand.
So what does moving forward actually mean?
Moving forward doesn’t have to mean forgetting.
It doesn’t have to mean forgiving.
It doesn’t have to mean reconnecting.
And it doesn’t have to mean deciding that what happened no longer matters.
It might simply mean that the situation takes up less space in your life.
That you understand yourself a little better.
That you can experience difficult feelings without being completely overwhelmed by them.
That you can make choices about your relationships based on what you need now, rather than being continually pulled back into what happened then.
You don’t have to stop caring in order to move forward.
And you don’t have to have everything resolved.
Sometimes moving forward simply means being able to carry what happened differently.
If you’re finding that estrangement continues to affect you, even when life appears to have moved on, you don’t have to work it all out on your own.
Hello, I’m Sarah Swain, an accredited therapist and coach working online across London, South East, Kent and the whole of the UK. I’ve worked as a therapist across the NHS, charities and Employee Assistance Programmes for over 15 years. I am trained in integrative therapy, coaching and EMDR and I support adults navigating estrangement.
Leave a Reply